Is there micro-life on Mars?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2017
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Modern Martian hunting involves looking for the tiniest evidence of life. But when presenter Marnie Chesterton found out that a scientist she was meant to be chatting to about cleanliness had previously worked for NASA, the topic of space bugs turned out to be too intriguing to ignore, especially when a CrowdScience listener asked us a question on a similar theme. Could Earth's microbes hitch a ride on our missions to Mars and colonise the Martian soil? As the European Space Agency's ExoMars venture gears up to launch a rover in 2020 that aims to find out whether there is, or has ever been, life on Mars, we head to the programme's clean rooms and Mars Yard - a giant planet-simulating sandpit - to find out. Marnie meets space engineers whose job is to prevent microbial contamination of Mars whilst creating robots that can find signs of life on the Red Planet. And she discovers that planetary protection is not all about remote aliens: Could tiny Martians have already arrived here on Earth via a meteoric hitch hike?
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Jen Whyntie
(Picture: Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, |
| 0:02.0 | Congratulations on making the excellent choice to download this edition of Crowd Science. |
| 0:07.0 | It's a zinger, if I do say so myself. |
| 0:10.0 | If you want to send us questions that inspire future episodes, the address is at the end of the program. |
| 0:16.0 | But I'll stop waffling now and listen to the show. Enjoy. |
| 0:22.0 | Hello, I'm Marnie Chasterton, and this is Crowd Science on the BBC World Service, |
| 0:27.0 | the show that takes your questions about life, earth, and beyond, to researchers all over the world who are hunting for answers and this week |
| 0:34.6 | we're going even further than usual blasting off from our planet's surface and |
| 0:39.0 | heading for our nearest neighbor Mars to look for life. Earlier this month I was talking to microbial ecologist Professor Jack Gilbert for our program on how clean do we need to be and he happened to mention some space research he'd done. |
| 0:53.0 | I've worked in the clean rooms at the NASA base stations on the international space station |
| 0:59.6 | with the astronauts to understand the microbiome of those spaces. |
| 1:04.8 | It seems only responsible that NASA tries to stop Earth microbes hitchhiking their way off our |
| 1:10.0 | planet's surface. |
| 1:11.3 | Who knows what trouble you could cause with a stray bacterium? |
| 1:14.8 | Well, simply making sure all your space tech is totally germ-free seems the answer. |
| 1:20.6 | Easier said than done though according to Jack. It's supposed to be 100% |
| 1:25.5 | sterile but it rarely ever is. It's extremely hard to eradicate all microbiological |
| 1:32.0 | life, all the tiny tiny things that you can't see, it's virtually impossible. So exactly what have we been accidentally sending into space? It's a question |
| 1:46.9 | that listener Martin Packer from Birmingham in the UK has also wondered about. |
| 1:51.0 | Were early space probes that landed on the Martian surface |
| 1:54.4 | a hundred percent free of microbes or have we inadvertently sent microlife to Mars? |
| 2:00.3 | And whilst we're on the topic, could meteorites from Mars or elsewhere have brought microbes to Earth anyway? |
... |
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